Wednesday, 29 September 2010

A Quick Question About 'The End of the Line'

I use the Underground pretty much every day (go to work, come home from work... and repeat) and I guess I’ve become far too used to it over the years for it to scare me in any way. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the scariest thing about the Underground is watching commuters (who are obviously running five minutes late to wherever they are going) literally throw themselves through the doors as they are closing. I fully expect to see someone chopped in half before the year is out...

That’s pretty much it for me though, the Underground just isn’t that scary. Or is it? Solaris editor Jonathan Oliver seems to think so as his name sits proudly on the front of ‘The End of the Line’, a horror anthology where the stories all share one theme; what’s lurking on the tracks that lie beneath our feet. I’m saving my review copy to read next month (Halloween and all that) but in the meantime I thought I’d go straight to the source and ask the following question...

'I use the underground everyday and I'm here to tell the tale. What's down there that's so scary?'

Jonathan Oliver was kind enough to take time out of his schedule for a reply and here it is...

I don't use the Underground every day. I don't get into London that often, but I used to go a lot when I was a stand-up comic. Usually gigs would go on quite late and I'd have to catch the last Tube. This would see me standing on the platform alone often as not, listening to the distant rumbling getting closer and closer, while feeling the brush of the warm wind rushing out of the darkness of the tunnel. There's something eerily atmospheric about the Underground, and I've often thought that it's criminally underused in horror fiction. There are a few examples (well, more now since we've published The End of The Line) I can think of, such as Deathline, the scene in the Underground in American Werewolf in London, Creep, Neverwhere, but there you see most of those are films, rather than prose. So, the idea for Underground horror has been in my head for quite a while, so when we decided to launch an anthology of horror fiction, this seemed to me the perfect theme. I was so pleased with how varied the stories we got were. These aren't just 19 ghost stories set on the Tube. Instead we have journeys within the characters themselves, as well as on the rails. There are brilliant ghost stories such as Christopher Fowler's 'Down', but there are also stories about impossible destinations (Michael Marshall Smith's 'Missed Connection'), a past love brutally re-visited (Paul Meloy's brilliant 'Bullroarer') as well as more lyrical stories about loss ('All Dead Years') and the paranoia induced by this error of terror (Ramsey Campbell's 'The Rounds). And these are just a few of the treats you can find here.

So what's down there that's so scary? Well, according to my authors, oh so very much. Where do you want to start?

I’m up for being persuaded that there could well be spookiness on the Underground after all, especially when Jon reminded me of ‘American Werewolf’ (that bit was scary!) I’ll be reading ‘The End of the Line’ sometime next month (you should be able to pick it up around the end of October or beginning of November) and will be sure to let you know if it lives up to its promise...